My subs have those barcode tattoos, but it’s not some kind of slavery play like it often is…
See we’re got a complicated poly free-use situation going on with lots of extended polycule members who may drop in and want to borrow a sub or three for a scene or a month.
So we designed our system around the non-kinky institution that most closely resembles our situation, where we’ve got a bunch of individual “resources” that need to be loaned out to verified patrons and tracked so we can tell where our items are, when they are supposed to be back, if they’re late to be returned, and put holds on them.
So we’re using a library management program.
You just go to the circulation desk, scan your polycule card, then the subs you want to check out. It’s a simple and efficient solution!
We’re still having some teething problems with late returns, though. And it’s trickier than we expected to fill out the item description pages. How exactly do you categorize a bisexual transmasc painslut with a thing for puppy play into the Dewey decimal system? Still, the work continues.
sorry but. doesnt that just make it some kind of slavery play in the end…?
also HOITT
Nah cause for slavery play you gotta, you know, do slavery play. Roleplaying that you own a sub, purchasing a sub, that kind of thing.
We’re not doing that (in general, at least. I imagine at least one dom/switch has done some slavery play with a sub they were loaned). We’re doing a free use thing where any sub can be used by any dom in the group (with safewords and preestablished limits, of course. We’re playing, not running some weird human trafficking ring). The barcodes are just to help keep track of who is where and with who, because this got way too complicated for just a shared Google sheets page.
And you may think it’s hot but that’s probably only because you’re not having to maintain all this library infrastructure! This software is from the 80s and I’m running it on NT4, and the damn barcode readers keep failing to scan. They’re just not designed to read the lines off human flesh, especially single they kinda assume that the target surface is perfectly flat, which humans rarely are.
I did suggest we used contactless RFID implants instead of barcodes, but half the polycule wasn’t into the idea of getting an RFID chip injected into them, and the other half was way too into it. (the puppysub half, natch).
So I’m having to research alternate barcode readers, which is going terribly. Do you know what happens when you call up Zebra and ask them which of their scanners work best on human skin? If you’re LUCKY, they hang up on you! And explaining “no, it’s for a sex thing” does NOT HELP.
So I’m stuck here at the circulation desk looking at datasheets and trying to compare how good they are at low contrast reads and non-flat surfaces.
I thought I’d found a handheld scanner that’d work, but it turns out that if your skin is any darker than your average Irish vampire, it fails to work. And frankly this whole situation is weird enough without accidentally implementing a racist tech stack.
I really got to get my resource allocation bar code soon…
I could give you one but with the current state of my system there’s like a 20%-25% chance you’ll end up in 386 Inland waterway and ferry transportation
okay, this is amazing. but why can’t each sub just carry a library card of their own, like a “resource card” that they can wear on a collar/cuff/piercing/whatever? and that you could actually lay flat to scan? like, I see the appeal of the tattoo bar code, but for practical purposes of the functioning system, wouldn’t attaching a bar code to the sub on a piece of laminated card make more sense?
Cards are a great idea, and we did do that early on, but the subs losing them was always the problem! When a dom comes by and grabs a sub and then goes off to a room to do Weird Things with them for an hour or two, nine times out of ten they’d come back with no card, and I’d have to manually look them up in the database. It took forever, especially on busy days like weekends.
Piercings would be better but they fell into the same camp as the RFID implants: most of the polycule was bleh on the idea, and one small group was WAY too into it.
And frankly those people give me enough trouble as it is. The hucow punks are always asking me to fix their equipment, and frankly, no! I may have grown up on a farm and studied electrical engineering, but that doesn’t mean I have the slightest idea how to repair or maintain a milking machine! This kind of vacuum hydraulics is a mechanical engineering problem first and foremost, and that’s just not my forte.
Sigh. Being the asexual IT person in a big kinky polycule is difficult sometimes.
I have done some research into collars and I think they’d be a good option. Last time I surveyed the ‘cule, all the subs were fine with collars (half of them were wearing them at least part-time already anyway), it’s just a matter of figuring out some good options for sourcing custom barcoded/RFID’d collars.
That also means getting feedback from the doms about what features they want, too. The last thing we need is for doms to be taking them off all the time because they’re doing a scene that needs a collar with D-rings or something. So we’re gonna have to make sure we choose something reasonably functional.
A few doms want to go all electronic fancy pants collars but I don’t think we really have the budget for that, plus I don’t want to have to support that.
And the obvious choice of finding a local leatherworker to make us a bunch of collars won’t work because we’ve got some subs who are vegans or have leather allergies! I’ve been looking at a place on Etsy that has some good canvas options, and maybe they can do us a bulk discount of some sort, maybe with RFID chips sewn directly inside, like they already do with an airtag.
(which is something a few doms have put on the features wishlist anyway, so they can easily locate lost subs. Apparently it’s not all that uncommon for a sub to be, uhh, “played” to the point where they’re in a haze and can barely remember their name, and then the dom goes off to get them something to drink and a pillow or whatever, but the sub ended up wandering off once they extricated themselves from the scene, and God only knows where they are now. Maybe they’re off in someone else’s scene? Maybe they’re playing ps1 games down in the lounge? Doms are always asking me “where’s $SUB?” and all I can tell them is if they’re checked out or not, not where they are.)
This is all very interesting but I do gotta wonder, where do switches fit into this system? Would they have to carry a card and collar and effectively check themself out before checking out a sub?
The barcodes are the same for subs and doms, so you can carry either (or both). It just depends on how you use it: either to log in (so you can search for and check out subs) or as an item ID being checked out. (I may have written about this already in one of the many reblogs, it sounds familiar).
Switches work fine in this system. You gotta understand that it has two separate but related purposes:
1. To help doms & subs meet up in compatible groups. You don’t gotta hang out in a common room and go “hey is anybody here into Reverse Bukkake?” and potentially have no one respond. You can just go type that into the search box and it’ll show you which subs we’ve got that’re into that, and you just filter it by availability.
The profiles of switches just list both dom stuff and sub stuff they want to do. So maybe someone will like to be a dom for sex but a sub for shibari, and obviously you’re not gonna meet up with them if you want to dom them for sex.
But it doesn’t have to solve the problem 100% to work. We’ve got one of those color-coding systems that are often used with free use situations, just instead of collars or whatever, it’s listed on their item page.
So while I said we’re a free-use situation, we’re… You know, sensible? Real people? Not a fantasy? (RACK and all that)
Like don’t get me wrong there are some people on here who marked themselves the equivalent of “feel free to jam a cock in me no matter what I’m doing. Don’t ask me if it’s okay.”, the majority are “yeah I’m up for the following activities, message me if you want to set up a sesh”.
So a switch might just be like “nah I’m only into that for domming” or “sorry I only feel like subbing today” and the dom can just go find someone else.
So yeah. Switches are just a bit more complicated than “pure” subs and doms. Their profile pages are a little longer, and you’ll usually need to ask 'em a question or two before you check them out, but they work fine. We’ve had enough switches to work out most of the kinks (no pun intended).